Close to the Pinoy's heart

Film Review: The Next Three Days

What would you do if you were a husband, and your dearly beloved wife is sentenced to imprisonment, having been convicted of a murder she swears she did not commit, and you are now left with a schooling child to take care of and a job to make both ends meet? The Next Three Days is a movie on these themes. It has elements we Filipinos can identify with: An aggrieved family and a system that is apparently unfair to them.

Russell Crowe plays John Brennan, an ordinary family man. He is an English teacher at a public school in Pittsburgh, contentedly settled with his wife Lara (Elizabeth Banks), who deals with typical office problems, and their precocious son Luke (Tyler Simpkins). John has understanding and loving parents he can go to, who are happy to have their grandson for long visits. John and Lara are on their way to raising a family. He has a secure teaching job; his wife has a job of her own. They typify the blissfully married couple.

John’s world and his idyllic existence of a peaceful and simple family life is turned upside down one morning when, while preparing for work and school, his wife, who has diabetes and keeps her problems from him, is arrested for her boss’ alleged murder. Every effort to establish Lara’s innocence proves futile, and she is sentenced to a life in prison. As a resourceful schoolteacher, he researches and makes multiple appeals for the reversal of his wife’s conviction, but all fails. Now desperate, and with people he trusted beginning to doubt his wife’s innocence, he decides to get his wife out of jail at all cost. He even finds a way through the Internet to meet Damon (Liam Neeson), a convict who has managed to escape prison several times, to ask for pointers on how to spring his wife.

Now, as played by Crowe, John is a transformed man: From a simple schoolteacher to a man of despair and seething with revenge, who has no qualms about turning to desperate measures. He plots the escape plan, forges passports, picks locks, disguises himself, drives recklessly to evade the pursuing police and even engages them in a gun battle.

The movie provides Crowe another platform to show his top-caliber and award-winning acting abilities. You as a member of the audience will feel his emotions and you are convinced to side with him all the way in the course of the movie’s progress. As a schoolteacher, Crowe is calm and collected, and attends his class with regularity. As a husband and father, he dotes on his family, visits his wife to relax, and brings his child to school and the public playground. As an embattled husband and father, his exterior demeanor is cool, but you feel his rage simmering just under the surface and about to blow up. He now has to find loopholes in the prison system to breakout his wife. Can he run from the law? Is his wife really innocent of murder?

Banks, as Lara the loving mother and wife with a paranoid and secretive character, ably acquits herself beside Crowe. She portrays a wounded character, with her personal demons under check, but explodes when she reaches the limit of her sanity. When she does things that will wreak havoc on her husband’s meticulous plan, you feel like pulling her out from the screen, slapping her several times, and screaming at her to “get back in there and have faith and believe in your husband!”

Simpkins, as Luke the son, shows a sensitivity that ranges from a playful child to one who has to isolate himself when he is taunted for having a high-profile convict for a mother. Even the mom-at-the-park (Olivia Wilde), who invites Luke to visit the ocean park, provides Crowe and his son with pained support and sympathy. For a while there, you are allowed to think that Crowe, as the lonely husband, will fall for her until the well-written script makes you realize that he will remain steadfast in his marital vows for better or for worse. (My kind of man!) Paul Haggis, the director, gets credit by drawing from his cast the great acting the movie deserves.

Go watch the movie (with your spouse and kids) not only because Crowe once again displays his acting chops, deserving of an Oscar nomination, but more so for a simple and engrossing story, which unfolds layer by layer before your eyes. The movie mirrors life as it is lived by a typical family with the joys and challenges that come their way, and the response, sometimes desperate, when a major trial sets in.

Now as to what I would do if I were the husband in the same situation as Crowe . . . There is no doubt at all — I would do the same.

(E-mail me at [email protected] or text 0927-5000833.)